New from Cambridge University Press!

Edited By Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt

This book "fills the unquestionable need for a comprehensive and up-to-date handbook on the fast-developing field of pragmatics" and "includes contributions from many of the principal figures in a wide variety of fields of pragmatic research as well as some up-and-coming pragmatists."

Book Information

This book deals with one of the most mysterious languages of the Far Northof Russia - the so-called Old Sirinek Language (OSL, self-designation ofthe speakers uqeghllistun). The language is part of the Eskimo family;however, its place in the family is unclear. According to some theories,this language is the last survival of a third group of Eskimo languagesalongside Yupik and Inuit. Although OSL speakers were located in easternChukotka, in the same area as Siberian Yupik speakers, and fused with thelatter to a high extent, the OSL retained deep structural, phonological,and lexical distinctions from all Yupik languages.In 1895 the language had 79 speakers, in 1964 it had approximately 30speakers, and in 1988-1990 there remained only four people who still couldspeak it. The last speaker, Valentina Wye, the person whose languageskills and patient efforts to share them made this book possible, died in 1997.

The book contains practically everything collected on OSL by severalRussian scholars - Ekaterina Rubtsova, Georgii Menovschikov, Nina Emelianova and Nikolai Vakhtin - during the 50 years from the 1940s to the1990s, with small additions of data collected by other people. It consistsof four main parts:

(1) Introduction, in which the history of OSL description is outlined, itsgenetic affiliation with other Eskimo languages is discussed, and a briefcomparison with Siberian Yupik Eskimo is given; (2) the main part of thebook, giving folklore and other narrative texts in OSL with Russianinterlinear translation and, for some texts, parallels from Siberian YupikEskimo language; (3) a small section presenting grammatical data on thelanguage; and (4) a supplement where lexical data are presented asmaterials for a dictionary, ca. 2500 entries.[written in Russian]